AI compute is increasing in efficiency and speed at breakneck speed. Nvidia just announced its ‘Grace Hopper’ GPU hartdware and its going to make it cheaper for industry to analyse and run ‘inference’ (AI speak for think) about what it is trained to understand. That can be anything from controlling robots, analysing visual data, your personal profile, talking to you in your own (cloned) voice etc. etc.
You will not realize AI is applied in your life, mainly to make you spend money, to homogenize your behavior, to addict you to movies and products, to make you ignore climate change etc. etc. Virtual reality is already becoming so appealing its addictive just like internet.
The question is : Is this all fair to you, the citizen. What if the entertainment provided to you to suggest purchases to you (which is all commercial content atm) is also influencing your political affiliation and making you vote for people that do not care for you. Britanny Kaiser wrote a nice book called “Targeted” about this happening during the Trump presidential campaign and Brexit vote with abused facebook data. This is not an imaginary threat but a very real one.
The window of one voice being able to educate people or point out facts may be closing, as its way easier to inject ideas into someone’s social media stream in the most attractive way possible than for any individual to get the attention and appeal to someone
Are we aware of this in our political system. Do political parties want to live in a world where citizens suddenly change opinions and nobody understands why? Where you get personal looking treatement that seduces you because the seller has access to personalized analysis of you, and you are not aware this is the case? How can you make any straight progress or any change from an individual preference perspective against an economy that is weaponized so strongly against you?
There need to be laws that limit this or AI weaponized companies will rob you blind, if not the big ones with an image, then the smaller more desperate ones in time. AI and virtual reality applied to profit generation will be like hypnotizing locusts. You have one chance to defend yourself, next election you will be made to forget about it.
Overheard conversation :
Big Oil : “So with this AI you can basically profile people based on their shopping habits and netflix preferences, and push them further into their consumption niche?”
AI Expert : “Yes, well you can only do and learn so much and the more you are online the better we can predict the effects”
Big Oil : “Ok, can you make sure they don’t care about the world burning and want to fly and shop as much as they can”
AI Expert : “Sure can!”
Big Oil : “And I guess making them vote for our candidate is also easy” AI Expert : “Haha, good joke!”
Big Oil : “Just testing, of course there is no candidate not on our payrole.”
AI Expert : “But seriously with enough personalized messages and algorithm tweaks everybody will be happy in their own bubble and hate or fear the rest of the world”
Big Oil : “Hmm.. so we can worry even less about our image”
AI Expert : “Frankly people will ignore you, they will be too distracted and amused”
Big Oil : “And a computer does this for us, it sounds too easy”